Family Storytelling Night®

Family Storytelling Night® is an interactive — and FUN! — parent, family, and community engagement event with ongoing supports after the event keep the benefits rolling all year long.

Happens in early childhood program and K-12 lunchrooms, classrooms, community spaces across America.

This unique tried, tested, and proven-effective event — and its after-event supports for parents at home, programs, and school-wide and across communities — elevates and celebrates shared community, literacy, and individual, family and community history/heritage/culture, uplifting everyone via the sharing of true stories.

Family Storytelling Night supports programs, schools, and communities in achieving key goals, including:

• Parent engagement.
• Family engagement.
• Community engagement.
• Early literacy enhancement and school readiness.
• Empowering parents and families to learn, grow, and connect with other parents and families — at the school or program, and in their community.
• Motivating parents and families to attend future school events because they had a BLAST at this one!
• Connection to school and community.
• Creating awesome parent/family/community “photo-ops!”
• Supporting schools and students, families and communities — in urban locales, but often rural and under-served areas.
• Hosting a demonstrably engaging event to inform future planning and support funding efforts.
• Giving families an awesome evening of food and fun! (Yes, serving food or snacks is HIGHLY recommended).
• Kicking off the new school year!
• Wrapping up the current school year!
• Doing something special for everyone mid-school year!
• Providing cool summertime activities!
• Empowering programs, schools, and communities with a ready-to-go event and follow-up resources they can use to meet collective goals. 
• Enhancing and documenting parent, family, and community engagement to demonstrate program impact, inform future initiatives, and support
  sustained funding efforts.
• Supporting ELL/ESL and multi-cultural events. Family Storytelling Night with interpreters is amazing for EVERYONE. (Patrick did this event on the Island of Saipan for speakers of 14 native languages!)
• Hosting a super-memorable event that raises the bar for parent and family participation at school all year long!
• Providing a super-interactive high impact parent and family event where everyone shares stories, laughs, and has a great time together.
• Celebrating the “make-and-take” COLORFUL Family Storyboards of participant children and families!
• Getting NEWSPAPER and other media coverage (the colorful  storyboards are irresistible to the press).
• Teaching parents and students a storytelling method (without books) to enhance literacy, build vocabulary and life skills, and draw strength from their community.
• Leveraging a guaranteed-to-succeed daytime or evening core event — with after-event supports — that matches your program/school mission, and your community partners’ goals.
• REDUCING STRESS in adolescent students whom, research shows, experience less stress by knowing how to “story share.” (And giving younger children those tools early).
• Giving your Head Start, EHS, or community school families the chance to proclaim, “This was the BEST time we EVER had at a family night!”

You’ll serve food to kick things off, then introduce Family Storytelling Night Founder Patrick Mitchell who’ll carry the event from there.

You’ll share the followup resources and tools with your program or community school families to take things to the next level after the initial event — and expect full, ongoing support every step of the way.